The great food divide: What does it mean for today’s kids?

I sometimes volunteer at my son’s San Francisco public school during lunch. In a bustling, noisy cafeteria, I help kids open their milk cartons, show them what goes in the compost bin, and discourage them from sharing fruit roll-ups and strawberries. (Sharing of food isn’t allowed due to the prevalence of allergies.)

Mike Flippo

Don’t all kids deserve healthy food?

I’m always amazed by the discrepancy in the kids’ food. Some children are opening BPA-free lunch boxes filled with quinoa salads, yogurt smoothies, and pomegranate seeds, while others are biting into soggy McDonald’s hamburgers and cold, stale fries.

And then there are those kids, at least half of the students, who buy school lunch or get it for free thanks to government subsidies. These are relatively healthy, always including a fresh fruit or veggie, considering the paltry sum of money the district has to work with. But for some kids, this is the healthiest meal they’ll get all day. Who knows what they’re eating for dinner?

There’s something unsettling, disturbing, downright wrong about one kid munching on a nitrate-free salami sandwich made with Acme bread while the other gets two bags of potato chips and a Capri-Sun in his lunch. These are kids, our country’s future. Don’t all kids deserve to eat the same healthy food?

A lot has been written recently about the great food divide between economic classes. A recent Newsweekarticle reported: “What we eat has increasingly become a definitive marker of our social status. As the the upper and middle classes constantly refine their tastes for meals sprinkled with Sicilian sea salts or for ‘locavore’ foods, the poor find it ever harder to find affordable food that’s healthy. In fact, 17 percent of Americans are described as ‘food insecure’ by the Department of Agriculture, while others splurge on fresh, organic produce.”

This food divide is clearly apparent in San Francisco’s public schools, attended by students from a wide range of economic backgrounds. At my son’s school, about half of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch, which means they come from low income families. One can only assume that not all of these families, which might make as much as $60,000 yet as little as below $38,000, can afford to put freshly prepared meals on the dinner table every night. What’s more, families living in low-income areas in cities often don’t even have access to fresh produce. There’s a nationwide problem with big-chain grocery stores abandoning the inner-city and focusing on suburb communities.

Yes, a food gap between the haves and have-nots has always existed. This is nothing new, especially in third-world countries. But I would argue that the gap seems to be widening here in America. In the South Bay town where I grew up, everyone, rich or poor, shopped at the local Safeway when I was a kid. Now, there’s a Whole Foods in that town, where the more fortunate are tossing organic blueberries, whole wheat pasta, and wild Alaskan salmon into their carts. Not everyone has the money to buy free-range chicken, Brussels sprouts, and wild rice, but everyone can afford a cheap frozen pizza and a case of soda.

In Newsweek, writer Lisa Miller hits on this point:

Among the lowest quintile of American families, mean household income has held relatively steady between $10,000 and $13,000 for the past two decades (in inflation-adjusted dollars); among the highest, income has jumped 20 percent to $170,800 over the same period, according to census data. What this means, in practical terms, is that the richest Americans can afford to buy berries out of season at Whole Foods–the upscale grocery chain that recently reported a 58 percent increase in its quarterly profits–while the food insecure often eat what they can: highly caloric, mass-produced foods like pizza and packaged cakes that fill them up quickly. The number of Americans on food stamps has surged by 58.5 percent over the last three years.

Of course, some might argue that this is the least of our problems, but then again you are what you eat, right?